MUSIC; Beatles in Vegas Against the Odds

By ALLAN KOZINN

Published: June 25, 2006

IT'S the Beatles! Live in Las Vegas! This week, and for the foreseeable future!

Well, O.K., it's not actually the Beatles performing live. After all, two of the Fab Four, John Lennon and George Harrison, are no longer among us. And although their surviving partners, both musical (Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr) and marital (Yoko Ono and Olivia Harrison), are expected to be in the audience at the Mirage on June 30, when Cirque du Soleil opens ''Love,'' its ambitious fantasy tribute to the band, there won't be so much as a Beatle cameo or a new song.

Still, Cirque du Soleil, the Canadian acrobatic troupe, and Apple, the company the Beatles started in 1967 to oversee their creative interests, have joined forces for this $150 million production, and they are billing it as ''a timeless, three-dimensional'' Beatles experience that, as one of its principals describes it, will ''make the audience feel as though they are actually in the theater with the band.''

Promised too is a new soundtrack. Apple has given the show's two music directors -- Sir George Martin, who produced the Beatles' original recordings, and his son Giles, who has worked with Elvis Costello and Kate Bush -- free run of the band's session tapes. Most Beatles fans would rather the tapes were mined for previously unreleased songs and upgrades of the standard albums. But as Giles explains, ''Apple's idea was that Cirque shouldn't just be performing to a CD.'' He adds, ''It had to be something more unusual, a new way of hearing this music.''

What the Martins produced was a 90-minute soundtrack in which classic Beatles songs are remixed in surround sound, sometimes combining standard versions with outtakes, and even creating mash-ups, or versions in which riffs, vocal lines, guitar solos or sitar drones from one song are interposed on another. Next month the pair will return to London to remix the music again for a soundtrack album.

What's truly odd about all his, to longtime Beatles watchers, is Apple's enthusiasm for such innovation. For much of the last 36 years, Apple -- whose four directors are the band members and their heirs -- has been a barricaded fortress from which volleys of lawsuits are regularly launched. Its response to requests to use Beatles recordings in theatrical productions and films has generally been a firm no. And in its zeal to protect the Beatles' name, work and trademarks, Apple has sued everyone from the producers of the late-1970's hit ''Beatlemania'' to Apple Computer. So what's going on here? Isn't the soundtrack to ''Love'' akin to what Apple so vehemently opposed in 2004, when Danger Mouse created ''The Grey Album,'' a mash-up of Jay-Z's ''Black Album'' and the Beatles' ''White Album''? For that matter, aren't these mash-ups exactly what Internet-based Beatles fan groups have done, often brilliantly, though necessarily flying well below Apple's radar, on underground collections like ''Mutation'' and the three volumes of ''Tuned to a Natural E,'' which can be found on various download sites?

Could it be that in allowing Cirque du Soleil to base a series of fantasy tableaus on Beatles music, and in letting the Martins take such liberties with the recordings, a usually cautious company is diving headlong into the 21st century? Has it awakened to an era in which promiscuous remixing has made the notion of a ''definitive text'' seem quaintly academic?

On the other hand, when Apple sics its lawyers on unauthorized use of the Beatles' music, is it really protecting the integrity of the group's work and image, or is it saying ''We own the Beatles name and music, and therefore only we can compromise its integrity?''

WHEN the Beatles started Apple, they described it as the antithesis of the corporate entertainment world: a haven where musicians, poets, writers, filmmakers and artists of all kinds could find support for their projects. Along with the Beatles' last four albums, the company released a magnificently eclectic catalog and a handful of films. But the open-door policy didn't last long: a parade of hucksters and freeloaders quickly drained the company's resources.

When the Beatles went supernova in 1970, Apple absorbed the immediate shock.

Sir Paul, hoping to extricate himself from the partnership, at first sued to have the company dissolved, but later reconsidered its usefulness. And for the next 19 years a tangle of lawsuits -- the Beatles against one another, and the Beatles and Apple against EMI Records -- were about all that Apple produced.

Those suits were settled in November 1989, and the terms were not made public. One detail leaked out, though: EMI would maintain its ownership of the recordings the Beatles made for the company between 1962 and 1970 but could not release anything without Apple's approval. At first Apple exerted this control vigorously, refusing to release anything on CD beyond the standard British albums, released in 1987.

Gradually Apple began to relent. Two popular early-1970's compilations, known as the ''Red'' and ''Blue'' albums (officially, ''1962-1966'' and ''1966-1970'') were reissued on CD in 1993. More recently Apple and EMI have collaborated on new compilations, like ''1,'' a collection of Beatles No. 1 hits, as well as ''The Capitol Versions,'' two boxed sets (so far) of the group's recordings in the configurations that Capitol (EMI's American arm) released in the 1960's.